


Soldier, Weapon, Stranger, Monster

by TobermorianSass



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Character Study, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:04:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6786394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/pseuds/TobermorianSass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Sokovian Accords were made for people like Steve and Tony, but Wanda is not like them. Wanda was a girl from Sokovia, made into a weapon by HYDRA. </p><p>The Americans don't see her very differently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soldier, Weapon, Stranger, Monster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EssayOfThoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/gifts).



> Or, in which the author attempts to deal with the fact that CACW raised a lot of interesting political questions and then failed to follow through on answers for them.

On the news, they keep showing the same clip over and over again - the explosion, the burning building, the crowd (angry, scared, covered in dust) and the bodies. _Wanda Maximoff_ , they say. Not Steve or Sam or Natasha. Just – Wanda Maximoff.

 _I did that_ , she thinks, watching the flames curl before the camera pans over the crowd. She memorizes each one so she won't forget. So that it sits in her skin as a reminder: you are dangerous. _Dangerous_. More dangerous than everyone else.

Steve tells her it is just as much his fault as hers before he turns off the TV. He means well; he doesn't understand. Wanda is not like the others. Wanda –

 _I am dangerous_ , she tells herself. _I am a stranger and I am dangerous_.

It is the first that the news channel fears the most.

* * *

Stark and the others fumble around the word but she doesn't need to hear them say it to know it's what they're thinking. When you are a stranger, when you think of home and think of a person instead of a place ( _P-i-e-t-r-o_ , she spells because saying it is still painful) you learn to read deeply into the little fractures between what people say and what they believe. You learn to read deftly between the lines. They mean to protect her. They think, _weapon_.

They are not wrong. She is a weapon. She was made as a weapon, made and moulded in the fires of HYDRA. _No_ , she thinks, _made in_ **Sokovia**. Without the bomb - without their parents’ death and the slow decay of Sokovia, she would have not been a weapon. She would have been a girl like any other girl. This is written on to her, tattooed on her forehead for everyone to see: inscribed on the cover, in every word of her passport. It does not matter that she would like to forget, or that Sokovia has not been her home for a very long time, not truly. She is Wanda Maximoff, a weapon, a Sokovian.

They do not call Steve or Tony or Sam a weapon. Or Clint. Or Natasha. Natasha, at least, understands.

“You’ll always be a stranger,” Natasha tells her once, with a rueful smile on her face. “It’s who we are. They don’t mean it, but that’s how it is. People don’t always understand the way it works - the way their words work.”

(Wanda doesn’t know the words they throw at Natasha. _Stop lying. Hard to trust someone when you don’t know who that someone really is. Is there anything real about you? Triple-impostor. Double-agent._

They roll off Natasha like drops of water off a duck's back. That’s her training.

She thinks wryly, _maybe it wasn’t all bad_ , when she sees Wanda’s seething, barely-contained anger later at Leipzig.)

The Accords - the _Sokovia_ Accords - are too little, too late and yet too much, too soon. They are ten years too late to save her mother and father (but the Accords don’t cover bombs and wars and armed militia, just them). They are one year too late to save Sokovia and Johannesburg and Lagos from them. From Ultron. (Could a document and a promise really have stopped Ultron?). The thought tempts her: she signs it and she becomes a soldier, not a weapon. Or maybe she becomes a weapon, but she becomes a weapon in someone else’s hands - a monster at the end of someone else’s leash. Maybe, she loses her freedom and Sokovia loses itself, nothing more than a footnote in the history of the UN.

She slides the document along to the next person. She’s seen what they do to weapons and outsiders ( _both_ , she thinks, _I am both, and a monster to boot_ ) in America. (Terrible things. Unspeakable things. Things that would put even HYDRA to shame.)

 _Not yet_ , she thinks - of men in orange jumpsuits and cages. _Her cage_.

 _Not again_.

Vision tells her he would like everyone to see her the way he sees her. He does not say: _Stark locked you in here for your safety_. He does not say: _you are a monster so they are afraid_. He is too innocent for that, but it lingers on the edge of everything he says. In the way he stands and blocks her from leaving.

It is a luxurious prison at least, she thinks. She has seen what Americans do with monsters, especially when they are _strangers_ and _weapons_. They are not so different from HYDRA. This is not a surprise: HYDRA was everywhere. It is not surprising they were here too.

But HYDRA, at least, did not _pretend_ when they locked her up in a cage.

* * *

Clint tells her: _it’s time to get off your ass_.

There is a line and Wanda reads between it. He says, _get off your ass_. He means, _you’re an Avenger_.

There is a line. On one side is a locked room, a locked building and the word, _weapon_ and _dangerous_ that circles round and round her. Between it she reads: _stranger_. _Outsider._ On the other side is a door, a war and scarlet around her hands. In Sokovia he told her: _doesn’t matter what you did, or what you were_. She thinks, _I am an Avenger_ and reads _you’re one of us_ , inbetween the lines.

Friends don’t lock their friends up, not even for their own good. Wanda allows the anger - a firestorm pulled into a tight pillar in the very core of her being - to sprout wings and collect at the tips of her fingers, over her hands and around her wrists until she feels she could fly east into the sun on the strength of her fury. She turns it into a single beam and aims it at the gem embedded in Vision’s brow.

(He uses her weakness, so she uses his. This is a declaration of war. This is how it goes.)

It is not Vision’s fault. But it _is_ Stark’s building.

* * *

They hold her arms at her side and put her in a strait jacket with a collar around her neck. ( _Dangerous_.) They don’t say it. ( _Weapon_.) They don’t need to. ( _Monster_.) She knows if she moves, it will tase her.

 _I am the outsider-soldier of your nightmares_ , she thinks wildly, as they push her into a cage, a room for her to perform her tricks for them, and the door clangs shut behind her.

( _Stranger_.)

She wonders if things would have been different if she had signed the Accords and allowed them to strip away her freedom. ( _Dangerous_.) If Pietro - she _says_ the name, as the world begins to fog - would have told her to sign them and keep her head down. ( _Weapon_.) People like her keep their heads down while they bind them to stakes and burn them. ( _Monster_.)

 _I am the witch-monster your politicians and news warned you about_ , she thinks. The walls of her cage are far away, so far away and the walls - the walls have disappeared all together.

She sees, instead, a bomb and feels the weight of crumbling stone, a building, on her back. It crushes the air out of her lungs, bears down on every single bone in her body and chokes her into silence.

She holds herself absolutely still. If she does not move the bomb will remain intact and she and Pietro will live. If she sits still, the collar will not tase her and the cage will not tighten around her. She knows: there are rules and if she obeys them, it will be okay. She will be okay.

( _Stranger_.)

She knows, because this is what Americans do to people like her.

**Author's Note:**

> I pretty much came out of CACW with Tony's statement 'we don't give weapons of mass destruction visas' ringing in my head and all my thoughts about Wanda's arc coalesced in an examination of her arc as an allegory of the immigrant experience (especially of second and third world immigrants) abroad and this is why this fic exists.
> 
> The Wanda's-collar-has-a-taser theory/idea/headcanon comes courtesy EssayOfThoughts & [wandasmaximoffs](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wandasmaximoffs).


End file.
